Hawa* had travelled hours to meet us. She had grown up in a Muslim family. Her father was a Muslim leader who travelled to different Arab countries to teach about Islam. She felt loved by her family and was engaged to a Muslim man who lived in the US. Hawa’s future looked bright.

Everything changed when she contracted a serious lung disease. The doctors feared for her life and all her dreams and plans seemed to disappear. But Hawa was exactly where the Lord wanted her. “One night in hospital I had a dream.” Hawa said to me, “I saw a man who was smiling and crying at the same time. I somehow knew he was weeping for me. I bowed down before him and asked, ‘Please help me. Show me the way. How can I be free from this disease?’”

When Hawa woke up she told her family about the dream, but no one understood it. When she had recovered and returned home, she told the mosque leader about her vision. “What you saw was Jesus, the Messiah.” He said, “I can’t talk now. It is not safe. Come back another time.”

Weeks went by before Hawa had another opportunity to speak to the mosque leader. “The one who is weeping for sinners is the one and only Jesus.” He told her, then he handed her a Bible.

Several believers involved in Christian witness paint Oman as a deeply religious country. There is a lot of spiritual conflict and oppression in this country. Believers experience many barriers when sharing the Gospel; “People are very friendly and seem to be open to the Gospel, willing to listen and exchange ideas. But to actually take the step to commit to Christ is very difficult for many of them,” one worker said.

However, in the midst of that darkness, God is doing amazing miracles, “Eighty percent of the Omani believers come to Christ in a supernatural way, through dreams and visions,” shared a Christian living in Oman.

“There is hunger to come closer to God! There is hunger for the prayer meetings for example. Now the whole congregation comes to these meetings. The church is full of people praying.”

This hunger is not just from Christians.

“It happens more with the Muslims and the Druze. God is speaking the language of each group. Muslims meet Jesus in dreams. A woman saw a man in a dream, he was dressed in white and his face was shining. She woke up and went to church, she was very afraid of being rejected. She was accepted with love.”

In the previous post I stated my view that no one who genuinely desires truth will be denied the opportunity to hear about Jesus. God has, does and will use a variety of methods to allow genuine truth-seekers to find the truth.

….everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened.

But the fact that God will honour the desire of the genuine seeker of truth does not diminish the responsibilities of those of us who already know Jesus.

It does not excuse us from going “into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation”
It does not excuse us from praying “earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into his harvest.”

In the cases I mentioned, God used gospel sharing believers to lead seekers like Cornelius and the Ethiopian to Jesus. The same kind of thing seems to happen with Moslems who receive visions and dreams. In the testimonies I’ve come across those experiences have led them to seek further, eventually finding a believer to tell them about Jesus.

It would be helpful to consider what Paul wrote to Timothy:

I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. As for you, always be sober-minded, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry.

While there’s a lot covered in that short excerpt of Paul’s admonition to Timothy, – maybe the part we can see as MOST applicable to us ALL is “be ready in season and out of season”. Be prepared at all times for opportunities to share the good news of Jesus.

In my previous post I addressed the view of some who insist that not hearing the gospel is no excuse; basically, as I put it, they are saying: “If you don’t get the opportunity to hear the gospel – tough!”

Here I’d like to put the boot on the other foot. While it’s easy to quote scripture out of context to insist that all unbelievers have no excuse (including the excuse of never hearing about Him) for rejecting Jesus.
Can we so easily excuse ourselves from what we SHOULD know, from what we are clearly told in scripture regarding our responsibility to make Jesus and His gospel known?

What about those who never hear about Jesus? Isn’t it unfair for them to be condemned if they don’t have the opportunity know?

In addressing that question I’ve come across those who say that no one is without excuse. Or in other words, there is no way out. If you don’t get the opportunity to hear the gospel – tough!

Not hearing is no excuse.

However, while that “without excuse” statement does come from scripture, it isn’t addressing our response to Jesus, it is addressing recognition of Creator God, that all of creation around us makes His existence clear to all.

(Rom 1), “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.”

So the question comes back to what happens with those who DO recognise the truth of Creator God and want to worship Him, but who live in a place where the gospel of Jesus isn’t freely available?

Are they denied access to the truth of Jesus, and the salvation he brings, merely because of geographical or cultural barriers?

In 2 Thess 2 we can read about people “who are perishing, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved”.

Regarding those who live in areas that are “closed” to the gospel, who may not ordinarily have the opportunity to hear about Jesus, isn’t it possible, or even likely that an alternative result based on the flip-side of that principle could apply?

Could there be people in those “closed” areas who actually have a desire and love for truth and diligently seek it? Would God leave those people without an adequate opportunity to find the Truth in Jesus and so be saved?

We get an indication in Acts 10.

Cornelius was a man who recognised God and worshipped Him to the best of his knowledge, but he was ignorant of the gospel. God met Cornelius’ need through a dream instructing him to seek out Peter, a man who could lead Cornelius to Jesus.

And while that may be a reasonably well-known bible story, it’s not merely an historical account. The same kind of thing is being reported today through countless testimonies of Moslems being led, through dreams and visions, to meet with people who can teach them the truth of Christ.

There is also the biblical example of the Ethiopian Eunuch in Acts 8, a man with a desire to know and understand the truth. Philip, through the instruction of an angel and directed by the Holy Spirit was sent to him in a “desert place” to tell Him the good news about Jesus.

So the question addressed at the beginning of this post seems irrelevant. A question that is possibly posed not out of genuine concern for those who don’t hear about Jesus – but as a way to diminish the gospel by making it seem that God is being unfair to a large portion of the world’s population.

However, in reality God doesn’t leave anyone who desires the Truth without a means of finding Him (Jesus, the Way the Truth and the Life).

He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us